Assassin's Creed III Dev Says Easy Mode Ruins Games

[Ascarus]

i don't really understand the sentiment .. in a single-player (SP) game if the player wants to casually play the game and lope through it on easy difficulty, who gives a shit? similarly if someone wants to tear their hair out and play through on super-hard-insanity difficulty, who gives a shit?

it is SP game .. let them play however they want.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Easy mode is not the problem persay. Making the games for the drooling masses who do not know what quality is , is the problem. Make games for gamers make them deeper less shallow and less linear, then rebalance the final product to piss easy and set the default to that as so those who know how to work a damn menu system can turn the real game on and not have to play crap....

 

[chimeracreator]

i don't really understand the sentiment .. in a single-player (SP) game if the player wants to casually play the game and lope through it on easy difficulty, who gives a shit? similarly if someone wants to tear their hair out and play through on super-hard-insanity difficulty, who gives a shit?

it is SP game .. let them play however they want.

It's a bit more complex than just let people do what they want from a development standpoint. For the most part different difficulties take time to engineer and add to the amount of time a game takes to create or sap resources away from other areas. For most shooters this isn't a major concern since all they need to do is throw in a multiplier to change enemy health and damage, but for other games it gets a lot harder.

In the Dragon Age series for example they have the difficulty setting affect if you experience friendly fire or not. They tested this in Origins and set the default at 50% damage for normal, none for easy and 100% for hard and above. In Dragon Age 2 however they didn't test this feature and as a result you only saw it when using insane difficulty and it rendered certain abilities and classes next to useless because of how poorly they balanced player characters and NPCs.

Since Assassins Creed isn't supposed to be about combat changing the difficulty also shouldn't involve combat. This is where the additional objectives and requirements to reach 100% sync come into play. Now in theory they could throw in additional even more difficult mile stones and then set these to: easy, medium or hard, but the trouble is that as the developers want the story to unfold a certain way if they set the bar too low then the narrative the player experiences suffers as a result all of which helps explain his position.

Example: If you have a highly time sensitive mission giving an overly generous timer that lets players run around and do whatever they want makes it easier, but it also makes the story less believable. So with Assassins Creed they try to balance this by saying something like:

1. You must reach it in 10 minutes
2. If you reach it in 5 minutes without ever leaving the rooftops you get 100% completion

 

[Paladin2905]

See, now I'd agree with the dev in sentiment- putting an easy mode in does ruin some of what a game was supposed to be. That being said, there is a long distance between challenging difficulty and what I like to call 'arbitrary bullshit difficulty'.

The best example I know of challenging difficulty was the xbox Ninja Gaiden. Yes, it was hard- but learning how to play that game was incredibly satisfying once you'd figured it out. Even when you'd figured it out the game was still challenging, and the best part for me was that nearly every time I died I knew why I had. This is the kind of difficulty that I think suffers from the addition of easy modes.

Arbitrary bullshit difficulty is things like dodging lightning 200 times on the thunder plains in FFX, or the rubber banding existent in some racing games. While these produce the illusion of difficulty all I believe they really do is make the game harder. Harder, not more challenging. Challenge is fun, hard is not necessarily fun (or at least often isn't for me). ABD is where easy modes really shine, because they allow you to reduce the difficulty of something that isn't fun. I remember a long time ago an article in PC Gamer that stated something I've always liked: "You play games for fun; when a game is no longer fun, that is when it is okay to cheat". That, I believe, is the key to where easy modes don't ruin a game- if it wasn't fun in the first place.

 

[Reyold]

Nowadays, I don't really do easy mode; I enjoy a good challenge.

Still, I wouldn"t say easy mode "ruins" games. It may be less fun for some, but not everyone.

 

[Revolutionary]

That's a pretty interesting comment for an AC dev (AC being one of the easiest games of next gen)

 

[Beautiful End]

Okay, ignoring the fact that AC can be kinda easy, he's right. Mario games have been stuck in Easy mode for who knows how long. I used to love Mario but I feel like I'm playing a game made for a3 year old. They used to be fun and challenging; they found a great balance between the two. Now they're just plain dumb. I wanna play them again but they're just not the same anymore.

Come on, developers. let the new generation grow up like we did; dying tons of times and learning by trial and error. Heck, back then, I never returned or sold a game because it was too hard. I sucked it up and passed it. For example, there were some part in GoW3 where I kept dying over and over again. Yeah, maybe I wasn't attacking the enemies properly the game wanted me to do a move a specific way and I didn't. Whatever, that's been around since the beginning of gaming. But my point is that after a while of dying, the game kept asking me to switch to Easy mode. No, I said, I want to beat this game in normal mode. I can do this; stop patronizing me.

but it's also true that you don't HAVE to play the game on Easy mode. It's just there to allow gamers to fully experience the game, even those who might not be as good as the game expects. I guess MY issue is with games that are dumbed down from the beginning just to accommodate a wider audience (Pretty much every Nintendo exclusive game for the Wii, maybe the last Ratchet and Clank, etc.)

 

[Ascarus]

snip

sure. i won't argue that varying game difficulty is game-type dependent and for games like assassin's creed having varying difficulty levels might be more challenging to implement than say a standard shooter where options to increase or decrease the difficulty are more straightforward (more or less damage, more or less health, creature numbers, etc.).

that being said, the developer of action games like asscreed should (and do, i imagine) just set the difficulty at the level at which they feel is appropriate for the game and let the player figure out how to sort through the challenge. but if someone decides they want to cruise through ME3 on the narrative difficulty for whatever reason, that is their business. it is a SP game and how they enjoy the game is their business.

that is why i really like cheat codes like godmode, or unlimited ammo or whatever. if i want to enable those cheats and go on a powergaming thrill ride through a SP campaign just because its FUN, then just let me have it! games are about fun (supposedly). so let me have it anyway i want.

 

[Faladorian]

Some games NEED an easy mode to just be playable by non-masochists.

Also... Assassin's Creed, as many have said, is already extremely easy. You can just use the hidden blade for most of the game and never die.

Spoiler: Not to mention...

 

[Something Amyss]

I think I get it

But assasins creed (the later ones) felt too "easy" in that if I screwed up I could jsut hack and slash my way out...or use a smoke bomb or whatever...not much sense of acheivment there

Wait, there was challenge in the earlier ones?

Granted, I never finished AC1 because it was BORING, but AC2 was pretty easy. Am I to believe they got easier than that?

 

[EHKOS]

Maybe, I can see where he's coming from, but it's not like anyone is FORCING you to select easy instead of Nightmare. I like to play games for the story, and the amusement. I don't really like a challenge. Easy mode gets you a wider audience.

 

[Something Amyss]

Secondly: Your analogy is full of fail and dumb. "Easy version or complicated version"? What you are referring to is called a SUMMARY, and those actually do exist (they're often called Cliffnotes), usually for educational purposes. Also, making two versions of a book would be entirely different from making two difficulty modes in a video game.

Also worth pointing out that we DO make multiple versions of great (and sometimes, not so great) works: In books, we do see abridged versions (less common these days except with audiobooks). In movies, we see director's cuts. In music, we see expanded editions (and I don't just mean bonus tracks) or even radio edits.

Some of these leave the original story intact and just pare it down or flesh it out. Others change it. But this is not an unprecedented concept in other media.

Lord of the Rings still ends the same way whether you watch the long version or the REALLY REALLY long version.

 

[plainlake]

Yes it would be like a stealth game where you can just walk up to the guards and kill them all, or even better, get NPCs to do it for you. How about a Hard mode? you know, for those of us who have played a game before in our lives.

 

[ResonanceSD]

If the AC3 designers can't think of an easy mode without breaking their game, it's their own fault for being unimaginative.

\

The main question here is why the AC3 devs need to add an easy mode in?

 

[Senare]

The wording of the escapist version of the article is misleading to me. Cited text is enclosed in brackets [].

Escapist wording:
[Lead designer Alex Hutchinson thinks easy modes represent the "worst possible version" of a game.]
This makes me think that he is commenting on easy modes in games in general

Edge Online wording (the source):
["A lot of games have been ruined by easy modes," he asserts. "If you have a cover shooter and you switch it to easy and you don?t have to use cover, you kind of broke your game.

"You made a game that is essentially the worst possible version of your game."]
This presents a different context, one in which it appears that he is commenting on the one particular game that he presented as an example - not games in general.

He is essentially saying that if you cram in an easy mode which bypasses your design decisions then you are not delivering the game as intended, but instead an inferior version of it.

 

[JokerboyJordan]

The wording of the escapist version of the article is misleading to me. Cited text is enclosed in brackets [].

Escapist wording:
[Lead designer Alex Hutchinson thinks easy modes represent the "worst possible version" of a game.]
This makes me think that he is commenting on easy modes in games in general

Edge Online wording (the source):
["A lot of games have been ruined by easy modes," he asserts. "If you have a cover shooter and you switch it to easy and you don?t have to use cover, you kind of broke your game.

"You made a game that is essentially the worst possible version of your game."]
This presents a different context, one in which it appears that he is commenting on the one particular game that he presented as an example - not games in general.

He is essentially saying that if you cram in an easy mode which bypasses your design decisions then you are not delivering the game as intended, but instead an inferior version of it.

Welcome to the Escapist.
This is becoming an increasingly common concern/opinion, and although you may be correct, I doubt your analysis will impact a decision to change the articles title.

OT: AC has progressively gotten easier with each innovation, I would prefer something more akin to AC1's difficulty.

 

[Dangit2019]

Maybe people who are new to games would like to play something without having to face overwhelming amounts of failure? Seriously devs, not everyone is as good at games as we are...

 

[thesilentman]

That's what I think of your opinions, Alex Hutchinson. You do realize that AC was always easy?